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Saturday, April 11, 2015

Be Post Modern

So yesterday I got to thinking about the idea of the new generation of magicians who have focused on exploring the grimoires, and ancient magical systems, actual tantra and Buddhism as opposed to Western appropriations, and actual Afro-Caribbean systems as a means of getting back to authentic vibrant living magic as opposed to magic as a psychological or social endeavor as being more authentically Post Modern than Chaos Magic.

I wrote down my thoughts and posted them to the Book of Faces and it occurred to me that this particular FB note was really basically just a blog post, and I should probably just start a blog...so...here we are.

Anyway, it could easily be interpreted that I am intending to insult the groups and movements which I suggest to fall into the "Modern" period of magic. I am not. I'm part of at least two organizations that fall within what I'm referring to as Modern. I think there is a lot of benefit to material from the Late Pre-Modern, Early Modern, and Modern phases of magic, but I don't think that it's an example of Post-Modernism, and I think the ideologies and approaches which I'm viewing as Post-Modern have a significant benefit.

Anyway, I don't really go much into what is Post Modern, but here are my thoughts on what's not.________________________________________________________________________________

Chaos
Magic attempted to position itself within the realm of the
Post-Modern as a way of suggesting that it is a sleek cutting edge
reality bending meta-modality. It has elements associated with the
post modern in its attempts at pastiche and satirical aesthetics. I
would posit however that Chaos Magic is part of the subcultural
development of Modernism within magic.

The transition to Modernism is
characterized by a dialectic relationship between the traditional and
the new which culturally represented in questions regarding the
family, urbanization and industrialization, morality, the community
as an organism, and other related topics. In magic we can see this
development but several decades later than in cultural studies
examining more general western culture. The advent of orders like
the Golden Dawn, the OTO, the various Theosophical groups, and the
other masonry and Rosicrucian based orders of the time were largely a
continuation of the traditions stemming out of the Enlightenment era.
Nothing about these organization represented a particular modernizing
current in the magical community. Temple magic was still largely for
the educated and leisure classes and it was largely a fraternal and
social endeavor. Views or ideas about the workings of magic or its
place in society were not experiencing dramatic upheaval, although
there were changes in the terminology used, and publication increased
largely because of changes in society at large.

We begin to see a
shift more like that of Modernism with the rebirth of these
organizations after their stagnation. A more commercial approach to
occult publication tied to city centers, and mass market exposure
develops, and the rebirth of both the Golden Dawn and the OTO were
connected to these shifts in publication. Magic expands to embrace a
less class conscious approach as it seeks to pick up young people
looking to explore their minds. The shift towards a discussion of
psychology that was beginning to the end of the Late Pre-Modern
incarnation of magic in the writings of Fortune and Regardie now
dominates magical thinking and discourse regarding the exact
interrelation of the mind and external phenomena becomes central with
the embrace of the more modern psychological model holding sway.

The
development of Chaos Magic and the IOT occurs within this phase. The
appearance of cultural rebellion didn't rebel against the rest of the
magical community of its time; it was generally coherent with society
at that time. The metamodel approach, while novel, seemed focused on
psychological underpinnings which were part of the general modern
proposition of magic and were being largely accepted even outside of
Chaos magic. The discourse that birthed Chaos Magic was the same
discourse that shaped the modern incarnations of the turn of the
century magical movement.

To put it more simply, Tradition poses a
statement, Modernism recognizes that statement and realizes that it
poses the question, “can tradition survive in a more
technologically advanced world?” and it provides an answer that
embraces technological advancement, (the survival of tradition is
less relevant to this relationship, but Modernity asserts the
subversion of surviving elements of tradition relative to the primacy
of the Modern context).

Post-Modernism sees the answer provided by
Modernism and determines that it was a failure. Modernity is rejected
and the structure is broken. There is no dialectic discourse. Post
Modernism embraces the schizophrenic pastiche of hyper-existence, or
the inter-textuality of ideas and phenomena as expressed by the
structure presented in hypermedia. The result of this rather than
dialectic should be synthesis. The answer in a Post Modern world is
that the summation of phenomena and information while apparently
discordant clearly coexist, subverting the concept that the cacophony
of existence is fundamentally discordant and implying that the
summation while experienced as a constant stream of pieces creates an
expression in which the juxtapositions inform one another. In such a
model the traditional and the technological modalities exist as a
shifting dynamism as opposed to a one sided solution to a dialectic
problem.